And you were thinking about the future of American Cities, you would have seen potentially a very bleak future. That was the time when particularly our urban cores, new york city and los angeles, were in the middle of a bona fide crisis. You had seen years of deindustrialization ravaged the working class of the city and an enormous middleclass flight to other regions entirely. That was very hard on the Fiscal Foundation of the cities and the civic life of those cities. You saw the tremendous renaissance over the subsequent decades. That renaissance was not even. You did not see it in every single American City but you did see it in a handful of cities that had a renaissance in governance. The Manhattan Institute was deeply involved in an urban renaissance but one thing we have been arguing for some years is that, wait a second, everyone. We are in a period of relative health. You see a comeback of many major American Cities but lets not take this for granted. Lets look at some of those frailties and vulnerabilities. Lets look at the fact that we do not always have the wisest longterm fiscal and economic policies. People seem to be preparing for only good times, not for potential reversals. When the covid crisis hit, i fear many of those underlying challenges, many of the problems that had been neglected started to really come to the four and were sharply exacerbated. My fear is youre going to see a period of 1980 22020 when you saw this tremendous disparity in prosperity in a number of major urban centers. At 2020 beyond, if we do not approach this in a thoughtful, careful way, could represent a reversal in which that Economic Activity, that talent, that flooded into our cities, starts to flood out of our cities. That is a dire view area i dont think it is inevitable by any means. That is what i believe thoughtful Civic Leaders should be working to prevent. How can we extend a renaissance and deepen it and ensure it reaches more americans and more citydwellers . To me, the covid crisis is both unique and pressing in itself it is also something that represents a kind of correction and reversal that many of us had feared for many years. Host here is a statistic that points to the growth of cities, from a New York Times story. Americas biggest metropolises had been in an extended period of growth with 10 cities, home to one third of all u. S. Economic production, and this is interesting, produces half of the patent in the United States. What were the factors that lead to that kind of growth in those select cities . Guest they had a reasonably large collegeeducated population. They wound up faring differently from cities that have a much smaller educated population. Essentially, there was a Path Dependence at work in which having certain civic assets, particularly a Major Research university, wound up paying very large dividends in the future. One reason is that when you have a Large Research university, you would often times see those graduates remain in the immediate area. You would build you would see them build businesses in that area. That would be a kind of self reinforcing process in which skilled professionals in other regions that did not have the same Critical Mass as other skilled professionals began to flock to the cities that became dense concentrations of that kind of talent so it could contain the increasing returns dynamic that became quite pronounced to the point where it actually had some pretty difficult and negative effects on communities that did not already have those advantages you could say cities that started out with a bit of a head start, saw that grow and grow and grow, so that has complicated, mixed effects for the country as a whole but also, when you are talking about scientific innovation, entrepreneurial innovation, it does benefit from positive spillovers, positive externalities. When you have a lot of is nest enterprises, talented people working at on the same kinds of problems in the same area, you can see a lot of iteration. You can see a lot of collaboration that would be much harder to achieve certainly and other eras when Transportation Technology and Communications Technology was not quite as advanced. You could not see that same kind of collaboration. There are serious gains to be concentrated in those areas had one question we face is whether that will continue to be the case in the future. Or have we seen Communications Technologies change in a way that makes the dense concentration of talent less necessary . I personally believe it will continue to be necessary but that is a very deep question for those cities that have made their bones, that have become successful as concentrations of talent. Host seven or eight months into the covid pandemic, what trends are you seeing that cities are facing that causes concern . Guest well, there are a number of them. The first and most important one is a deterioration in Public Safety. Now, when you are talking about crime statistics, we need to keep in mind this is a moving target. Things can change quickly. But if you are looking at cities that release Realtime Data on crime, over the last few months, there has been an unambiguous increase in homicides. We have seen that in new york city. You have also seen it in a number of other cities as well. You have seen an increase in shootings, whether or not they result in a death. That is a huge problem. When you think about that urban renaissance we talked about earlier on, one precondition for that Economic Growth, for that revival, for the fact that those who could afford to live elsewhere decided to make their lives in major American Cities, the preconditions for all of that was the dramatic improvement in Public Safety that you saw in the 1990s and 2000, and that dramatic improvement in Public Safety was not just about making cities more attractive and appealing for middleclass residents. It had a transformative effect on poor and workingclass people, for whom they did not necessarily have another option. They were constrained. They could not just move to the suburbs. They did not always have the resources they needed to pick up space and move to another state entirely. These are people for whom this dramatic improvement in Public Safety had a huge effect on every aspect of their lives and it makes intuitive sense. If you are someone with limited assets, property crimes can ruin you. Property crime can be something that prevents you from climbing the economic ladder. It is something that because it engenders fears means it is harder for you to form deeper constructive relationships with other people. It makes everyone withdraw from public life. It makes everyone withdraw from the street, and it also engenders a lot of distrust. Society is where you have a lot of Violent Crime. Cities where you have a lot of Violent Crime are places where you dont have the kind of civic trust that greases the wheels of commerce and innovation. If you are thinking about upward mobility for poor and workingclass people, Public Safety is nonnegotiable. It is the foundation of everyone else. That deterioration, if it is temporary, if it is a blip, if you get this under control, that makes Everything Else much, much easier. That really is the thing that is absolutely nonnegotiable. The other thing forgive me. Host let me stay with Public Safety. Lets talk about mitigation if we talk about the challenges. Of course, in the wake of George Floyds killing, the protests around the country, there is a major rethinking spurred on by a lot of civic protest about the work of Police Departments around the country. The Manhattan Institute has been very much involved in this over the years. They were big proponents of the broken windows theory of policing decades back. So what is the institute thinking as the country rethinks policing about the best way forward . Guest we have a number of scholars who work on policing and criminal justice issues including heather mcdonald, rafael, jim copeland, among others. We have journalists who work on this set of issues as well, so there is, as you might expect, a range of opinions. We always want to encourage our scholars to go where their ideas take them, provided they are confident, with our deep belief in the central importance of Public Safety, and i say, when you are looking at this moment and looking to the future, it is very important to keep in mind that effective policing is vitally important. You can change society in any number of different ways, but effective policing, that sense of Public Safety is a foundation for Economic Growth or a flourishing Civil Society and Everything Else we care about. So then the question is what are the policies that will deliver more effective policing over time . There are many thoughtful people who offer different perspectives on that set of issues but one thing i am personally very concerned about right now is that there is a sense in which we are demanding more from Police Officers. We are demanding that they be more sensitive, they be more community oriented, that they approach the work in ways that will enhance the legitimacy of policing and i think that that is a valid demand, valid expectation. That is what you want. When you want to approach policing in these ways, you need to think about what are the policies that are actually going to get you there . I would argue that the idea of defunding the police is actually moving in a counterproductive direction. One thing that you absolutely want to see is better training of Police Officers and better training can be quite resource intensive. When you are thinking about compensation, there are many legitimate debates and discussions we can have about work rules, about compensation and what have you. When you are trying to attract talented people to a profession, particularly a profession that is under fire, a profession where there are a lot of very sharp criticisms of the folks in that profession, you will need to even more generously you will need to compensate even more generously. Change the way you are offering pension and Health Benefits and what have you, you might want to change the way the career arc of a Police Officer or another Public Employee works overtime, but what you do not want to do is move in this very reflexive way from a position of demonizing Law Enforcement from a position of demonizing Public Employees. Rather, you want to see how can we restructure these organizations . That restructuring might mean more resources rather than less, it might mean focusing in some areas rather than others here the other thing that is really important to keep in mind with police is that policing, to a very large extent, is about deterring crime. So when we are talking about criminal justice issues, people often talk about incarceration and policing as though they are entirely separate issues, but in fact, when you look at the United States compared to other market democracies, we actually spend somewhat less on policing and more on incarceration, and i would argue, and again, you know, this is something that is very debatable. Other thoughtful people have different views. I would argue that investing in Public Safety on the front end, investing in deterrents and prevention can be an effective way of reducing the need for a more punitive approach on the backend. That is not to say we do not need incarceration. Far from it. That is not to say you do not need to punish in a thoughtful, responsible way. It is not something people are missing when they are talking about defunding the police and actually pulling resources from programs, from training, from things that can actually make police more trusted and more effective at doing the work that we all need them to do. Host lets return to challenges for cities that have been highlighted by the pandemic. What is another . Guest another big challenge for those cities that had really flourished during the urban renaissance, during that period from 1982, the pandemic itself, is that many of the cities are very dependent on skilled professionals, high income households. That is true for a number of reasons. When youre looking at the economy as a whole, you see a transformation in these economies from an economy rooted more on the tradable sector, more on manufacturing and what have you, to an economy that is very service oriented. When you are looking at those professionals, they often times outsource a lot of household production. This could be true if you are a parent, with childcare, for restaurant meals, delivery, any number of services that make the cities very attractive as skilled professionals. It allows you to work longer hours and what have you. That is something that generated a lot of employment for workingclass people, particularly workingclass immigrants. When you have a pandemic, a shift to remote work, a variety of economic structural changes that make those cities less attractive to affluent, skilled professionals, then you have knock on consequences for those working and middleclass people who are in those Service Industries that are dependent on the dollars of higher income households. Another closely related dimension is the fiscal dimension and that is the fact that a number of cities have moved in a direction where they are dependent on a volatile base. They are dependent on the taxes paid by a relatively small number of very wealthy households and that means that they are very dependent on the benson this cycle business cycle. Even if you leave the pandemic aside, you can see a sharp correction when you have some decline in income for those professionals and their incomes tend to be a bit more cyclical. If you have an exodus of those individuals of those families, then that can mean that you need a very different approach to public finances and also potentially a very different attitude towards public spending than you did you took that population for granted. Host staying with the knowledgebased workers, university of chicago is suggesting as much as 40 of u. S. Jobs can be done remotely. I know you are already seeing, we all are, these debates happening about whether or not companies are, after a few months, thinking this is a different thing. Even a good percentage of the 40 ends up in permanently remote, what is the impact on the economic phase . There probably are positives and negatives. Guest it depends on if you are looking at this from the perspective of the country as a whole or from the perspective of cities pit one can argue that from the perspective of the country as of cities. One can argue we are coming out of an error that i hope will continue but an era of enormous urban success but urban success, as we discussed earlier, has been very concentrated in a small number of metropolitan areas that has a dense concentration of skilled professionals. Of course, there are those regions in the rust belt, many rural parts of the country that has seen a real brain drain so one possibility is the rise of remote work will create more flexibility in that regard and make it somewhat easier and more tractable for those other communities to compete for talent but of course, if you believe the concentration of talent is particularly invaluable for the United States strategically, in the wider world, there are particular externalities that are harder to capture when you are distributing that talent in a more broadway geographically. That is a cost you need to be mindful of from the perspective of the country. So i think that that is one way to look at it and i know that there are many communities, suburban, rural, some cities that have had a more difficult time in recent decades that are seeking to capitalize. The tricky part is that you are going to see those professionals who can be mobile, in a position to move, they will want to move to places with a very high quality of life, places that offer them attractive amenities. Certainly, they could be places that offer a good deal when it comes to taxes and spending, but i really believe that that high quality of life will be particularly important. That is work we at the Manhattan Institute have been focused on for many years and that is one reason why. You could have somewhat high taxes but if you are offering very high quality services, that can balance things out. Unfortunately, there are many cities where you are paying high taxes and you are not getting terribly Good Services but that is of course a larger conversation but i think that that is why there will be an opportunity for well governed communities, for communities that have efficient local governments that are able to bring out the best in their local workforce and creating the conditions for entrepreneurial growth. That could be cities. I would argue that many of these great cities will have a great advantage in that regard, so going from the countries to the cities, what you could see is a deepening of some trends we have seen for some time. The idea of a concentration of jobs in a Central Business district is something we as a country have been moving away from for many decades. A place like new york city, you have a huge concentration of jobs in the Central Business district and jobs in the outer boroughs, wider suburban region can one way to think about this change is you will see that trend become more pronounced. And then, you have an opportunity to repurpose some of that Central Business district. You have a number of cities, chicago is a great example of this. The downtown population is dramatically higher today than it was 30 years or 40 years ago. Some of these buildings that are right now office buildings, one could imagine in 15 to 20 years becoming thriving residential communities. You have seen that on a smaller scale, in new york city, and lower manhattan, that has been a trend. That has been a powerful and positive one. You could see the transformation of other Central Business districts into Work Communities where people really appreciate the aesthetic qualities, the opportunity to be around a certain cultural sensibility, so what you could see is a change in cities to become more village like, in which you still enjoy the benefits of density and where people are not necessarily commuting to a large Central Business district. There are many opportunities here and there is no room for defeatism but if you are going to do that, you need a regulatory climate that allows entrepreneurs and families and individuals to actually adapt, and right now, in many major American Cities, you have regulations that lock in a certain use of buildings, of structures. You make it very hard to create new business models, including for building and i think that that is a huge problem and that is something that we urgently need to change. Host i want to come back to workers, but staying with the cities and their governments, it would be logical that most of the city governments are so consumed with handling the pandemic related issues that theres really not much bandwidth to be thinking about how do we envision our city Going Forward . How do cities have this between approach to handling the crisis in front of them but also saying what will this city look like when it is over . Guest one important thing to keep in mind is that when you look at the civic revival in many of our great cities, it is not driven by city hall. What city governments did is what the most effective of them did and make sure that they are protecting Public Safety. That was a very cool priority, and seeing to it that when you are looking at the kind of tax and regulatory climate, that it was not unduly destructive of wealth creation, not unduly counterproductive and that was a huge struggle but they tried to contain that. The rest of it was done by Civil Society and entrepreneurs, by private business enterprise. A lot of it in a place like new york city was done by immigrants. Many of them workingclass immigrants who came in and really revitalized neighborhoods. Again, those background changes and Public Safety and what have you created those conditions but i think the actual nittygritty work of building businesses, creating employment, and also reenter nursing those gains in Public Safety by providing eyes on the street, ringing density back to neighborhoods that had been largely abandoned, those were decentralized decisions made by many different individuals and that is a big instance for us, the idea that what you want government to do is not engaged in central planning. You do not want the government to direct where Economic Activity is going to go but rather, you want to enable individuals and Business Enterprises to actually do that work and that is where Something Like landuse regulation really is a great, pronounced example because landuse regulation is an area where all too many cities have moved in the direction of richard central planning. They said we want this kind of use here or there. For people who say, hey, i want to provide affordable apartments in my home. I want to find some way that people who cannot necessarily afford a home of their own, where they cannot necessarily afford an apartment with all the bells and whistles, have some place that can be for a few years while they get on their feet, gain skills, climb the economic ladder area but the regulations we have in place right now make it extremely hard to do that and when societies change, when families change, when you go from a world of single breadwinner families, you know, every family having 2. 5 children, to a world where people delay marriage, people have children later in life, they might have smaller families, there are many people who are getting an education for much longer than they did before so they cannot necessarily afford the same kind of home. You need the urban environment to be able to adapt to those ways that daytoday life is changing and when you have regulations that lock people in place, you make it very hard to change with a changing culture and changing society. Host you talked about what could happen as knowledge workers perhaps shift their work environments, but what about all of those millions of Service Workers that right now i mean, congress has been pushing money out to try and save Small Businesses both from the employees side and also with the ppp money, but we are all seeing stories in our own communities of Small Business people that are just giving up. They cannot hang on. Restaurants try to open and then the restrictions come back and they have to lay people off again. So what is your thinking about how Small Businesses revitalize after this epidemic . Guest this is a very challenging question partly because when you have a crisis like this, it can have very unpredictable effects. If we had a shutdown that lasted for a few weeks and the virus that had been largely eliminated, then you can talk about snapping back to an economy that closely resembles the one that we had in the prepandemic moment, but when you have something that is very lasting, it is likely to have a very real effect on the psychology of individuals. It may well have an effect on how people lead their lives, how they consume in a much bigger way, so when that is the case, it is not obvious that you want to preserve the prepandemic economy in amber. Rather, what you want to do is facilitate the transition to a new economy in which you are going to see many of the Small Businesses. We want them to come back. We want them to thrive. We also want to be realistic about the fact that if you are looking at a different world, a different set of expectations, different kinds of consumer behavior, you want to help Small Business owners and large Business Owners adapt to the new dispensation. There are many legitimate debates we could have about exactly what that ought to look like, and the truth is we have scholars who have a range of different views on those questions and you know, i think that there are many views that deserve to be taken seriously as part of the legislative process. I really think the important thing is keeping that longterm perspective in mind. If we do things that prevent businesses from pivoting and changing, then we are going to potentially hamper the longterm economic recovery and our longterm prospects for growth so that to me is a really, really important thing to keep in mind. We do not want to be purely nostalgic. We want to create the conditions for that entrepreneurial creativity that has always been the way that we restore growth. Host in this article, which is our conversation, you start with the fact that this country in the world has to get its arms around the covid19 pandemic, and you are right. We have to meet the threat of covid19, and effort that must be led by a competent and committed federal government, so you are arguing for federal government. Many conservatives are happy with this being a state oriented decision. Are you arguing that that may not be the right approach . What are you saying here . Guest i absolutely believe state and local governments play a very important role, but our system works best when there is a clean and coherent division of labor. Unfortunately, in recent decades, we have gotten very far away from that division of labor but that is certainly my impulse about how to think about federalism and when it comes to the longterm efforts to roll back the pandemic, this is going to be something where Scientific Research is going to play a very big and central role. If you think about the Incredible Energy you are seeing from the National Institute of health, that is something a local government simply cannot replicate. When you are thinking about the process of accelerating the development of therapies and vaccines, that is not something local governments not something state governments can do. In the american tradition, we have really relied on the federal government to take the lead when it comes to that kind of response to kind of leading the scientific response, which ultimately is going to be a huge part of how we get out of this. When you are looking at state and local governments, these are governments closer to the population. These are governments that have a more nuanced and rich understanding of how you want to respond differently when it comes to the delivery of services and much else. Now, in the face of a crisis of this kind, i think that there can be a budget a mineral for countercyclical aid from the federal government but i also think it is important that that aid is structured in some way that is not going to lead to irresponsible decisionmaking in the future. And then it goes back to state and local governments that we are going to want to be mindful of the longterm. Again, that is my big emphasis. In our political climate, in this kind of polarized moment, theres always an obsession with thinking about the daytoday political outcomes. And from my perspective, and from the perspective of the think tank, we really want to be sure that we are laying the foundation for longterm success for our cities and country as a whole. When it comes to that, when it comes to the pandemic, Scientific Research is just so profoundly important, and it is not something where any city hall is going to be able to bring to bear the kind of resources that the federal government can bring to bear. Host another topic that you write about, and we also have an opportunity as a country to rethink, is education. As schools are now trying to figure out how to come back, what they have learned from trying remote work remote study over the past six months, what is your thinking . You are a proponent of a pluralistic approach to education. What does that mean . Guest our team is very committed to educational pluralism. And the idea here is that when you are thinking about school, we often take a very rigid mechanistic view. You put in these inputs, get these outcomes. But a very important part of schools that work, schools that are most successful, is they are very aligned with parents. Now, when you are thinking about a young person, a k12 student, they are in school for eight hours a day, but their family, they are part of for their entire life. At home, they are interacting with parents and grandparents and loved ones in their neighborhoods for a much longer time. When the values of parents, when the values of families are aligned with their school, then you have a very powerful combination in which the lessons you learn at home, in school, and vice versa, are constantly being reinforced. When you have those value systems at odds, then you have a real struggle in which it can be much harder to get a highquality quality education, and so, our view is a pluralistic approach means they will have different parents with different aspirations for their children. They will have children who respond differently to different kinds of education. It is not the case that every single child in america should grow up to become a welder or ballet dancer or engineer. They are going to want to have many different successful models of adult life. That will be informed by family, informed by religious values and much else. Having a more pluralistic system is something that is more sensitive to the incredible diversity of families and the diversity of individuals and their particular needs that individual students bring to the table. So my view is that having this very rigid and centralized approach to education is not really drawing on the incredible diversity, creativity, the talent that we have in our communities. One way to think about this is that we want a more pluralistic approach and that we want more room for charter schools, more room for private, independent, parochial schools. Different schools. It is not just about choice among schools. It is also choice among instructional providers. There are many schools around the country where you do not have the resources or enough demand to offer a class in mandarin or in portuguese or in hindi. Those are things that can be incredibly enriching for some students and those are things you can offer via distance learning. When you are thinking about the pandemic, you are thinking about the shutdown of many schools. In some ways, this is accelerating a lot of trends you have already seen towards individualization, greater diversity. And i think you are seeing this real clash in which you have many traditional Public Schools. Many School Districts that are finding it incredibly hard to adapt, but you are also seeing some schools, particularly charter schools, some private schools, that have managed to adapt quite quickly to this Remote Learning environment partly because they are in some cases not burdened by the same work rules. They have a culture that is a bit more pragmatic and a bit more responsive to change. That is not to say that traditional Public Schools cannot become more flexible in those ways. And theres some School Districts leaders, superintendents, who have made an effort in that direction. But having a more decentralized system really wouldnt make it would make it much easier to respond to crises of these kind in the future. Host there is not a pointing out of the resource gap between poor urban School Districts that could not pivot to Remote Learning because they did not have Broadband Access for their families, did not have access to the technology versus better financed School Districts. Guest there is no question that there has been a gap in that regard but it is also true that you have seen some organizations, particularly a number of highperforming charter networks. You have also seen a number of Catholic Schools and long island. There is a small district that has had incredible success and one reason some of these schools have had success, some of the networks have had success, is they had a more cohesive culture, and also, when it comes to their instructors, they already had more of a culture of professional development in which there is more coaching, more interaction between mentor teachers and other teachers, apprentice teachers, who are really looking for that kind of active feedback. These institutions have a lot more flexibility when it comes to their budgeting and can engage in realtime budgeting. When you are not just looking to city hall, the department of education, when you are not looking to the state capital for how you budget, then you can actually reallocate resources more effectively so that if you decide we need to ensure that people have good equipment that is available to them, that is a decision you can make in a more nimble and responsive way. Now, we are going to see we have already seen some federal aid for School Districts. You are seeing support for that across the board politically. The question of how is that it actually going to make its way to students and teachers . How will it make its way to the classroom . When you have rigid and centralized School Districts, there really is this incentive to protect the way fitness has already been done and to strongly resist any innovation which could, you know, people want to say it is a trojan horse. We are going to try and teach children in a varied front way in a very different way in the future. My view is you want to do that. You want to be open to that kind of innovation. You should not be afraid of it. I think when it comes to budgeting, merely having some flexibility can make a very big difference. Host one other policy issue is transportation. Anyone visiting probably any of those top 10 u. S. Cities over the past four or five years, transportation during the workweek is at a standstill in most of them. Many of them now have most people really not working in downtown. Cities have an opportunity to rethink transportation issues. Do you see that happening that there will be a major rethinking of how people move around Going Forward . Guest i believe that is quite possible. We are in a moment of great uncertainty and projecting what the world will look like in 18 months is difficult. There are some longterm underlying trends. One thing you have seen is the number of vehicle miles traveled in the country has drifted down in part because younger adults, for a number of reasons, seem less inclined to drive. You see younger people getting their drivers licenses later and later in life, and you also see a growing interest in living in dense walkable neighborhoods. There are also counter trends as well and you certainly see people change their habits and their desires as they grow older, but it does seem as though there has been a secular trend in the direction of somewhat less driving. Another unpredictable element of all of this is the advent of new transportation technologies. Theres been a lot of enthusiasm about self vehicles. That revolution has taken longer than many had anticipated but it seems like theres certain kinds of traffic. Truck traffic. Deliveries. Things that account for a very big share of urban traffic. Those are things, even if you do not go to full self driving for passenger vehicles, could be things where you have a much larger role for autonomous vehicles. That could be something that has a very significant change on the transportation picture. And then theres the fact that there are other Traffic Management tools we might use. Right now, in the United States, we typically use very crude tools to finance transportation. We use gas taxes, general tax revenue. We use approaches that are not necessarily responsive to the actual wear and tear, to the actual Market Conditions that are informing how transportation is actually used, that determine the kind of maintenance schedules that you actually need, and there are a number of countries, australia, new zealand, innovators on this front, where they say we want the Public Sector to be the purchaser. We want them to be the client. But that purchaser is going to work with departments of transportation that are structured as publicly owned corporations but that operate in more market oriented fashion, that are more responsive to demands. We use different approaches to pricing including user fees that see to it that you are not necessarily paying the exact same amount but rather, you are paying an amount that depends on how much you use the Transportation System so there are many ways to do that, many private approaches we might use, but i think that that is going to be something that will come to the fore in the future because it makes more sense than a onesizefitsall approach. Host in the last part of our conversation, i wanted to learn more about the institute and also about you. You took the home of the Manhattan Institute about 15 months ago before we thought about this pandemic as a global society. How has its arrival shifted the direction of scholarship that you oversee . Guest we are very fortunate in that the core issues that we think we about, we care deeply about advancing a freemarket perspective. We care deeply about the fate of our cities, state and local governments. We care a great deal about medical innovation and many other issues besides. We care about educational pluralism. We care about a wide range of different issues and we have worked on a wide range of different issues that have really been heightened by the pandemic. The importance of them has only grown in the face of the pandemic. When you are looking at the fate of our cities in particular, this is something that has fallen out of our National Policy conversation partly because the issue has become so polarized. But this is a moment where cities are at a real crossroads. And i believe that we have for years been arguing that we are taking public for granted, the fiscal help of our cities for granted. Now, unfortunately, we have seen a set of changes that have only highlighted the incredible importance of those issues and the fact that we need policies that are resilient, policies that are responsive. Policies that are really about advancing the longterm health of these communities rather than the kind of shortterm political cycle, so i really think that this is just reinforced has reinforced our conviction that that set of issues is deeply important for our countrys future. Host prior to taking the position, you had a successful career as an author, as a pundit, as an intellectual area why did you take the job . Why did you want to lead an organization at this . Guest the Manhattan Institute has been an important part of my life for a long time. I grew up in brooklyn, new york, in an era where crime was rampant, and it had a very deep effect on our lives. It made us more fearful. It made us less inclined to enter civic life. It was something we took for granted, much like the weather, just being the victim of a robbery, of a mugging. It was something we almost expected to happen, yet it was incredibly demoralizing. We just accepted it as part of the world, part of the cost of doing business, of living in a Community Like ours, and then i also lived through this incredible transformation we saw in the 1990s and 2000 where you saw communities utterly transformed, and then when i came to a certain age, i started getting curious. How did this happen . Where do these ideas come from . From early on it became clear to , me that the Manhattan Institute was the font of pragmatic ideas, not just about Public Safety but about Economic Growth, about regulation, about much else, and then i became an ardent follower of this work. When the opportunity arose to become someone who could help be the steward of this work, who could help advance my Civic Responsibility to be the steward of an institution that had been such an important part of the life of so many American Cities that it had a real influence on my life and my family as well. I really felt it was an opportunity i could not pass up. It would have been something i would regret. Host how long has the institute been around and how active and involved is your board and the direction of the scholarship . Guest the institute was established in 1977 and we have a number of different funders. Our trustees are very committed to our mission, but we also have support from other foundations. We have support from a very diversified base of funders. So although our trustees are cheering on our mission, advancing our mission, they give us a great deal of autonomy in advancing it. Host when you were hired, the wall street journal wrote a profile piece about United States was conservative iconoclast takes the helm of the Manhattan Institute. Are you an iconoclast . Guest i certainly am a conservative. My conservatism is fundamentally about the decentralization of power. It is fundamentally rooted in this idea that we want to learn from our past. We want to be grateful from our past and the institutions we have inherited and that our attitude towards the future and towards improving our society should be rooted in the idea of learning from the best of our past and taking a reformist approach rather than one that seeks to really start from scratch, start from zero. In that sense, i am someone who really believes that when you are part of the society and when you want to move it in new directions, you need to really be sensitive to its history, to its roots, to its subtleties and distinctiveness. One of my concerns is that a lot of folks, a lot of intellectuals i have learned from and have been very impressed by, are people who take a more centralized topdown approach, where the thinking is, you know, lets have a program, lets have a central plan, and lets release it on society, and then really demand that people, that institutions, that families conform to our design, conform to our plan. My conservatism is all about this idea that, you know, we want a healthy, vibrant society to be an iterative process, to be a centralized discovery process in which we recognize that knowledge is in all of us, not just in the hands of some central planner. That brand of conservatism i , dont think it is terribly iconoclast. Not all of us call ourselves conservatives. We dont really have an ideological label. What you want is a society that really empowers and enables individuals, families, neighborhoods, to divine solutions. And wherein government is something that is really there to provide them with Public Safety, to provide them with conditions for building successful lives. Host the last time you gave us an interview was in 2009 and at the time, we asked you the same question about your foundational principles. Lets listen to what you had to say back then. Guest i am a conservative who believes conservatives should be oriented to reforming institutions to make them work better but the heart of my political beliefs is the view that the world is not made of oppressors and oppressed. Rather, the world is a complicated network in which good guys can be bad guys and bad guys can be good guys at different times. So when you think about political and economic problems, you have to think about them as how do you line up everyones interests in the most productive way . Host still sound relevant to your thinking today . Guest i have to say that young man was very wise. It is mortifying to hear your own voice. But i really think that that continues to be very central to my thinking and i know i am not alone in that regard. I think that a lot of our politics is really about conflict. We really fixate on the idea that we want one side to win and another side to lose. But we are a country. We are a society. Someone who might be your rival in one moment may very well be your ally in another moment and i think that that is really important to keep in mind, and i think that, you know, the policy work we are doing, you know, we are a nonpartisan research organization. We are certainly right, conservative, Classical Liberal in our gut instincts and orientation, but it is very important to us that we speak to everyone that there are elected officials who might have a range of different sensibilities, but we want to be sure that we are speaking to everyone, that we are serving as a resource for everyone. In some cases, that might reflect the fact that we are very aligned in our sensibilities. In other cases, it could mean we offer constructive witticism, a constructive criticism, we will offer a different perspective. The really important thing is that we all want to have a prosperous, Flourishing Society in which everyone, particularly those who are most disadvantaged, are able to climb the ladder, able to realize their full potential. That is not something where we are at each others throats, not something where we are at odds. I believe the kind of work that we do at the Manhattan Institute can really inform the work of folks across the political spectrum. We do not shy away from the fact that we have certain beliefs and principles but i think , emphasizing that someone who might not beyond your page today or might not be aligned with you on this issue may very well be an ally on another issue and its a really important thing to keep in mind. Host you are a first generation american. Profile pieces describe your parents as being liberal in their thinking, in their approach to policies. At what point did you realize you were oriented in your thinking in a different direction, that you are in fact not a liberal . Guest first, i will say i think about some of the second americans partly because i was born in the u. S. , and my folks are immigrants who are firstgeneration, but my parents, like a lot of folks, their political views they have moved back and forth. When i was growing up, you can describe them as pretty liberal. I think that my own views and sensibilities have certainly evolved. I really do think that this idea of decentralization of power, the idea that we do not want to put all of our eggs in one basket, we dont want to just trust some kind of expert class, we dont want to just trust some distant bureaucracy, i think that that idea has been broadly pretty consistent and it is an idea that, you know, you have seen pop up on the right and the left at different moments, but it is an idea that drew me to conservatism. It is an idea that is very important to me right now. I say that part of it was relating to what we talked about earlier on. Talking about just growing up in a major American City and seeing it become safer over time, seeing a different intellectual and ideological approach really contribute to the revitalization of that city. I think that was a big, Big Development in my change in worldview, so i would say that when i was in my late teens, when i was in college, i think that i really didnt start i did start seeing things a bit frontally, but i think that it was part of a longer evolution, and part of that longer evolution was just thinking, you know, you do not always want to there could be some consensus view. There could be a view held by many thoughtful, intelligent, serious people, but that does not necessarily mean it is right. People ought to think for themselves. We want an educational system that is not imposing views on you but rather giving you the tools to think for yourself, and i feel very fortunate that in my own education, i did have a lot of teachers. I did have professors. I did have people who really welcomed debate and disagreements, and i feel very fortunate in that regard because i unfortunately do not think everyone has that experience. Host several times during our conversation, you mentioned the importance of immigrants to our economy and the vibrancy of our economy. You have written a book about immigration. What are your thoughts about the current debate going on in this country about immigration policies . Guest there is much to say about that. One thing that i think that its worth zeroing in on is the effect that you are seeing in cities. Starting in 2018, chicago, los angeles, and new york actually saw a decline in their population. There are many reasons that is true, but one thing that is an important part of the story is immigration, Net International migration, so for a very long time, you have seen a departure of nativeborn people, particularly working and middleclass nativeborn people from many of our larger cities, including new york city. But those departures were balanced out and then some by the arrival of immigrants into these cities. When you see a sharp decrease in immigration, as we have seen in the last year or so, that has a very pronounced effect on cities in particular. The urban renaissance we were discussing earlier on, a big part of it was you saw immigrants move to neighborhoods that had been left behind by a lot of working and middleclass nativeborn americans and that is part of what brought vitality, part of what brought density back to many of those communities, and that also, by the way, is part of why those communities became more appealing to many nativeborn professionals, that vitality, energy, the services that were then available. When i think about immigration policy, i do believe, as i argued in my book, that there is room for a selective immigration policy, room for a thoughtful immigration policy that is also thinking about what are the skills and talents, what are the needs that different immigrants are bringing with them to our country . I think in the face of the pandemic, you have really seen a dramatic decrease and a lot of disruption that i think we would not want to see continue indefinitely. I think that coming out of the pandemic, when we feel like we have a better handle on inflows and outflows, when we have a better handle on the course of the virus itself, i think we ought to have a conversation about an immigration policy that will serve our countrys interests over the longterm and what we want to keep in mind is the vitality of our cities, our capacity for innovation, and whether or not we are setting ourselves up for longterm Economic Growth. One important background here is that the birth rate in the United States is declining. It has been declining for some decades, but now you are reaching levels well below replacement rates. That means we are relying on immigration from rural for more population growth and that can be a mixed bag because having a balance between a healthy birth rate and immigrant inflows can be important culturally and otherwise. Another issue is that the countries that have been the main sources for immigrants to the United States and latin america, in asia, those are countries that are themselves aging very rapidly. We have often taken for granted that those places will supply us with an unlimited supply of migrants, but that is not going to be the case in the future. So in a way, we might be entering a world where we are actually competing with other market democracies for immigrants, particularly for skilled immigrants, for immigrants who are wellpositioned to build businesses and to create patents and much else. That is something that will change the politics of immigration and the policy of immigration longterm. Host it has been a pretty wide ranging conversation. We talked a lot about the big challenges and some opportunities facing cities right now, but in a piece for the Manhattan Institute supporters, you wrote that the genius of american Civil Society has been apparent since the start of the pandemic. What are you thinking about when you wrote those words . Guest i am thinking about things i have seen in my own neighborhood where you have communities coming together to provide for the most vulnerable. You have seen this without formal organizations in a lot of places but where people see a need, they see a need for help that is not just about money, that is not just about access to Public Services but is for care, and one of our big emphases at the Manhattan Institute is the idea that although there is a place for safety nets, there is also a place for relationships of mentor ship, relationships where you are actually trying to shape character, trying to change the way that people approach their lives. Those are things that is very hard to do in a bureaucratic fashion, things that need to be done by volunteers. People with whom you have a really longterm, lasting relationship, and one of my hopes is that the disruption we have seen in the pandemic is going to change how people see their neighbors and communities. I hope it will lead people to be less passive in how they approach civic life and more as the offer of their own lives and the ongoing lives of their communities and cities. I think we have seen some signs to that effect. It will take some time before that bears out but i am cautiously optimistic that people feel a bit more as though they need to be part of the solution. They need to take on some of that burden themselves. In taking on that burden, they are leading better and more fulfilling lives. Host that is it for our hour. Reihan salam, thank you so much for spending your time with cspan. Guest thank you very much. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] all q a programs are available on our website or as a podcast at cspan. Org. Journal,s washington every day were taking your calls live on the air on the news on the day and we discussed policy issues that impact you. Coming up monday morning, the latest campaign 2020 news with the managing editor, and recent news on the coronavirus in the u. S. Watch washington journal, live at 7 00 eastern, monday morning, and be sure to join the discussion with your phone calls, facebook comments, texts, and tweets. Monday night on the communicators, American Economic liberties executive director sarah miller and the Senior Advisor arbor comstock on whether big tech is too big. There arent going to be more facebooks, more amazons and more googles, because our antitrust workers and policymakers have allowed these handful of corporations to amass an enormous amount of power over their respective markets, to shut down competition and engage in stop referencing. What i heard from the leaders of those businesses was the american success story, and all the things they are doing to help our current economy thrive and grow and how to make america the most competitive tech ecosystem in the world. Miller and barbara comstock, monday at 8 00 eastern on the communicators, on this week, cspans the contenders looks of the lives of 14 men who ran for the presidency and lost but changed political history. Watch this week at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. Starting on monday, 1844 candidate henry clay. Right now, the british house of commons is on summer break. The next question time is scheduled for early december. We look back at highlights of the recent parliamentary session in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, including u. K. Relations with russia and china and protests and response to the death of george floyd. From the bbc parliament, this is about an hour
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